Приманивание Снарка.

I wasn't thinking in anniversaries but tumblr posts reminded me it has been
twenty years on the 22nd since the first broadcast of Torchwood.

... it's actually easy to look then in my DW...
https://beccaelizabeth.dreamwidth.org/763228.html
seems I liked it from the start.

I had a bunch of feelings about this time interval that are not strictly speaking about Torchwood.
Compare and contrast sort of feelings.
It has not been a fun set of feelings.

My life has been somewhat easy to summarise since 2013 and that has not been on the whole a good thing. Nor have my efforts to improve on that got very far. Tiny tiny steps.

But Torchwood itself is of the good, or at least fascinating.
And Big Finish just announced that the Legacy audios next year will be available on CD after all, presumably because a consistent number of us still buy them, so I can tell there's at least that many audio Torchwood fans left.

The thing is Torchwood is a story of good dedicated people doing everything wrong, much of the time. Being slotted into a Lawful Evil system and getting really good at helping their mates who are also in the Lawful Evil system and therefore fitting right in. Being required to act in secrecy and from that alone doing all sorts of awful things for the secret. Which everyone a bit knows anyway. It's all sharp edges and contradictions and people being their most fucked up selves.

It's brilliant.

... it's varying qualities of brilliant at all times, but it's so much more fun to take big swings and miss than it is to be tidy.

Very messy show.

I should rewatch some on the TV. ... honestly the little app for audios is so much easier to fit in my day I have been living in audios lately. But I never actually watched Miracle Day so technically there is more (ambitious, flawed) Torchwood waiting for me any time...

Today my sleep watch reckons I got about ten hours sleep
and I feel all spiffy
presumably this is what well rested feels like?

but i took so much more than ten hours to do it
because i had to be awake for two eyedrops (to be done three times a day) and one appointment
so it was like six am to eight pm.

... so so nice feeling actually awake...

... but if this is what it takes to feel rested there is a slight problem left of how much day there is in this day.

Today - the awake that started Sunday but had also finished earlier Sunday - I did a fair proportion of Sunday tasks, plus laundry and dishwasher, so I should feel pretty okay about my achievements.

Then today - the actual part since midnight - I think I got hold of a plot bunny that unstuck my story. The story is still too much a mess. But I think I have parts that can make it go.

Of course the parts make a tidier two person horror story connected only by the same building, but I am working on that. That part can happen and the other part can be the solve. Possibly.

I need better research sources, which is to say any that are not wiki or the google making things up. I need to think of better searches for the not google pages. I still like the feeling of the google telling you things you don't know you don't know but every single time it includes some obvious and very glaring falsehoods so what is the use of that? No use. But when I try and follow links from wiki it is all paywalls and websites that don't do things and academic books the library don't got that cost giant money and I can't tell from here how much is relevant. And I have no research patience lately, I just hare off after the next interesting bit.

I started the afternoon looking up Witchcraft Acts, Henry VIII and the Dissolution of the Monasteries. It's all fascinating but pretty soon you whoosh past a couple of centuries of horrible violence and it's ... there are many things that I could use for story parts but it seems to trivialise the problems they lived through. But if I find the right thread this is exactly the stuff that horror comics drew on that felt proper deep and resonant. Find the right connections and it is about fear and factions and social break down in ways one hopes would never be relevant.

I like the idea that Torchwood or the Forge or SHIELD or UNIT all encode a particular relation of power both within Britain and between nations, and then add aliens and magic. It's kind of like time travel via institution. The ideas that founded them set their agenda.

So other eras of British history would do something equally distinctive to the organisations they shape.
( Read more... )

And I know way too little about laws and politics to figure out how magic would layer into them.

But the magic is the vehicle for telling stories about relations of power so you are saying
What if Seperate religious laws in religious lands
What if families that buy the right land have power
What if just promising to never use power again and keeping it all in restricted books
What if working for the legal but unpopular boss
What if oaths were binding
What if service was compulsory
What if we trampled over the rights of our own people and then took that show global
... what can we learn about never doing it again?



What if I get some sleep before I have to get up again.
... the math is not on my side on that one.

But I keep finding out so many things I could usefully learn and such complicated systems where all the parts have to work right together always or Horrible Consequences and it is all fascinating
without being immediately useful.

Ah well.